At its annual user conference in San Francisco, Couchbase launched the beta release of Couchbase Server 3.0. As part of the beta release, Couchbase is also introducing a contest for developers who improve the release - the Couchbase Server 3.0 Bug Bash.
Database Change Protocol in Couchbase 3.0
“3.0 is a very big release for Couchbase,” said Couchbase CEO Bob Wiederhold. “There are some major architectural enhancements that allow many features in the system to be significantly improved from a performance as well as an operational perspective. And the foundation of that is the Database Change Protocol (DCP).”
The DCP enhances speed by removing bottlenecks, and provides better utilization of increased memory and network capabilities. With the new DCP, Couchbase view performance is improved - changes made to documents are immediately streamed and rapidly indexed, making it possible to query data at near-real-time speed.
Additionally, the DCP enables greater performance in Couchbase’s backup capabilities, said Wiederhold. The DCP reduces latency for Couchbase Cross Data Center Replication (XDCR) by replicating data memory-to-memory from the source cluster to the destination cluster.
On-the-Fly Tunable Memory
The new release also introduces on-the-fly tunable memory, enabling businesses to have all data to stay in memory for fast response times, or to select a subset of data to reside in memory. In the previous systems, Couchbase required organizations to have the key-value store to be in memory, said Ravi Mayuram, Senior vice president of Products and Engineering, Couchbase. Now, he said, users can choose what portion of the data to keep in memory and the rest can be on disk. This new tunable capability enables Couchbase Server to support very large data sets more efficiently and cost effectively, and to support new use cases since the database can be configured on the fly to support an application’s needs.
Simplified Administration
Couchbase 3.0 also includes improvements that allow simplified administration, such as options for backup and restore and new bucket priorities. The new backup options enable incremental backups of only data changed since the last backup, thus requiring less storage and completing faster. New bucket priorities allow administrators to better control the virtual containers that logically group records within a cluster.
Security in Couchbase 3.0
The release also adds security improvements, said Wiederhold. Security enhancements include SSL encryption for data in-flight between client and server, providing secure on-the-wire data access for applications and administrators; and encrypted HTTPS access to the Couchbase administrator console and the REST API.
Improvements for Developers
And, for developers, Couchbase 2.0 SDKs enable access to native JSON, making it easier to build applications in widely used languages; there are new asynchronous and reactive interfaces in Java and .NET, providing the abiloity to build richer applications; and there are also new integrations with open source frameworks such as Spring, gEvent, twisted, and Ottoman.
Contest to Find Bugs in Couchbase Server 3.0 Beta
Couchbase is rewarding developers who help make Couchbase Server 3.0 a more secure, high quality, and bug free release. Winners will be recognized in three categories: most severe bug, most unique bug and most number of bugs. Information about the Couchbase Bug Bash is available at www.couchbase.com/bugbash.
A list of new Couchbase 3.0 features can be found here.